The 6th Day (2000) | Sci-Fi Saturdays

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Now you see him, now you see him again.

The Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle The 6th Day pulls the wool back from a series of cloning that take place in the near future. But the film is really only a clone of other sci-fi and action films, with little real meat on its cloned bones.

First Impressions

Arnold Schwarzenegger is back, and this time he’s an escaped clone from an experimental lab. The trailer shows that he’s a copy of an actual person, but one that he doesn’t want to lie down for the scientists to destroy. He knows who he is and he’s going to take control of his life. It’s a science-fiction action adventure with lots of shooting, explosions, and chases. It’s The 6th Day.

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

The Fiction of The Film

At some point in the near future (2015, according to Arnold Schwarzenegger on a DVD featurette), “Sixth Day” laws are passed making human cloning illegal. A famous XFL quarterback, Johnny Phoenix (Steve Bacic), breaks his neck and is euthanized by Marshall (Michael Rooker), a Millennium Security agent. A news report the next day states that he will return to play in the next game. Adam Gibson (Arnold Schwarzenegger), a pilot with Double X Charter services, celebrates his birthday with a blood and vision test for a charter flight with tech executive Michael Drucker (Tony Goldwyn).

Adam leaves the office when his wife calls to let them know their young daughter’s dog, Oliver, has died. He asks his partner Hank Morgan (Michael Rapaport) to take Drucker on the snowboarding excursion. When the helicopter lands, a man named Tripp (Colin Cunningham), kills Hank, Drucker, and Drucker’s advance man. Adam arrives at the mall in a taxi, asleep, and enters the Re-Pet store. He decides to skip getting a clone of their pet dog, and instead buys a Sim Pal doll for his daughter. Returning home he sees a perfectly healthy dog, and a clone of himself with his friends and family, celebrating his birthday.

Four members from Millennium Security arrive at the house and grab Adam. He manages to escape but kills Wiley (Rodney Rowland) and Talia (Sarah Wynter) in the process. That night Drucker, alive again, shows up outside Replacement Technologies and the Weir Organ Transplant Facility for a gala in honor of Dr. Griffin Weir (Robert Duvall), whose work makes Re-Pet possible. Protestors picket the event against the cloning of pets, and one day humans. Adam goes to Hank’s apartment and tells him that a clone of himself is with his family.

Taking Hank to his house, Adam proves there’s another version of himself.  Back at Hank’s apartment, Tripp breaks in and shoots Hank (again). Adam kills Tripp, who admits to previously killing Hank and Drucker. Before he dies, Tripp also lets Adam know that Weir is secretly cloning people, including Adam. Weir’s wife is also a clone. She was dying and so the doctor cloned her without her knowledge or permission. But the clone is also dying. She tells her husband she doesn’t want to come back again.

Adam comes up with a plan to stop Drucker by stealing Drucker’s syncording (the synaptic-recording that gives a new clone its memories) and kidnapping Weir. Drucker has his own plan and takes Adam’s wife and daughter hostage before revealing to Adam that he is the clone, verified by tiny dots under the lower eyelid. Weir is released, realizes his work may be unethical and quits. So Drucker kills him instead, having everything he needs to live forever. Meanwhile, Adam-Prime has snuck into Replacement Technologies, kills Vincent (Terry Crews), and rescues his family. Adam-2 uses Drucker as a human shield who gets shot by Wiley.

Drucker starts the cloning process before he dies, but Adam-2 sets off a bomb and releases an incomplete version of Drucker. The gross looking clone tries to bargain with Adam-2 but is unable to convince him. Adam-Prime shows up with a helicopter to rescue Adam-2 as the building, the technology, all the syncordings, and Drucker’s incomplete clone explode in a fiery inferno. Adam-Prime sets up Adam-2 with a new franchise of Double X Adventures in Argentina, allowing him to live out the rest of life.

“No, I don’t think science is inherently evil. But I think you are.” – Adam

History in the Making

The 6th Day is a clone of a clone of a clone. In it, Schwarzenegger still plays an action hero, but the more downplayed, everyman, 90s version of his more outrageous 80s roles. Certainly his age had something to do with the less overt action scenes, but also the plot and set pieces take more precedent in the film. In much the same way that Schwarzenegger’s Eraser or Stallone’s Demolition Man created elaborate and slick high concept futurism, so too does The 6th Day. Evidently a huge amount of the budget went towards the futuristic sets and props to create a near future world in which it is possible to recreate a human within two hours. Unfortunately the world does not seem organic, as everything that ever gets mentioned or seen are all in service to setting up something later on. As with other films with Schwarzenegger from this era (Batman & Robin, End of Days, Collateral Damage), The 6th Day suffers from over-engineering and not enough interesting characters. Everything that takes place in the film has been seen before, usually having been done better elsewhere.

For starters, Arnold is not set up as some superhuman individual. He’s a family man, who does  have a military background, but is now just a business owner for a charter expedition company in the Pacific Northwest somewhere. Granted there’s not much to do with his characters to differentiate them from one another. This film ends up reminding audiences that he has been in other, better sci-fi films like The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and Total Recall. The villain is not terribly menacing, but fits the existing character mold of “evil CEO.” Though here, Goldwyn’s portrayal of Drucker is as a clone of Apple’s Steve Jobs, complete with turtlenecks and wire rimmed glasses. He’s a bad guy who will try to stop Schwarzenegger’s brawn with his brains. The story becomes a wrong-man on-the-run scenario that never feels like much is at risk. At least with Schwarzenegger in the lead. Astute audiences may also recognize that something is amiss early on and suspect that Adam is actually the clone, even though he believes himself to be the original.

The film was directed by Roger Spottiswoode, who wrote the Eddie Murphy/Nick Nolte action comedy 48 Hours, and directed a mix of films including Terror Train (1980), the 1997 James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies, and some 80s comedies including The Best of Times and Turner and Hooch. He had worked on a number of films with big actors, and bigger budgets, but had never made a sci-fi film before, or since. His take on the action-thriller is decent–as far as any other similar film of the time–but creates a science-fiction film that looks credible, but has very little else on the inside.

Genre-fication

The filmmakers went out of their way to ensure that The 6th Day looked like a futuristic film. It featured a mix of things that seemed plausible along with a number of things that seemed like a good idea to put in a near-future sci-fi film. The most featured elements are the Whispercraft helicopters. These are futuristic looking designs that can be remote piloted with a wrist mounted joystick, and can convert from rotary craft to fixed wing jets at the push of a button. These were based on current VTOL designed aircraft, but created wholly as a fictional craft for the film. The film also included self-driving cars, big screen televisions, and video conference calls which may go unnoticed in the world of 2023 where these things do exist. But maybe too they’re just upstaged by the human-sized Sim Pal toy (which is not only ugly but annoying. What parent would really buy one of these for their kid?), or the holographic (and interactive) virtual girlfriend (which Blade Runner 2049 did better). It seemed like these elements, along with the cloning, sounded like cool things to put in the film.

In the genre of science-fiction the notion of cloning is not new. But in 2000 it was a lesser used subject. The earliest sci-fi film dealing with cloning (here called a “reproducer” that duplicated people) was the 1953 British film Four Sided Triangle. That film was more about just copying an individual, like a transporter accident in Star Trek. Later films dealt with more realistic ideas of cloning, like The Boys from Brazil which depicted Nazi scientists attempting to clone a version of Hitler. Later, and most popularly, was Jurassic Park, which brought extinct creatures back to life through genetic engineering. There was even a comedy called Multiplicity, with Michael Keaton, where clones are reproduced from an existing human, but degrade with each successive copy, like a Xerox of a Xerox. The 6th Day was at the forefront of a new batch of television shows and films that dealt with clones and cloning. It may not have directly influenced them, but was at ground zero as the interest in this genetic technology peaked based on real world events.

Societal Commentary

In the final years of the 20th Century, cloning went from science-fiction to science-fact; at least in part. Scottish scientists cloned a sheep, Dolly, in July of 1996, which became the first full mammal (but not the first animal) grown from a cell. Medical ethicists quickly began discussing the implications of the new technology and by May of the following year, the United States created a law banning Federal funding for human cloning. The film depicts some of the public concerns about cloning, including having protestors gathered outside of the Weir Institute picketing the cloning of pets. Remember that the human cloning of the film was unknown to the greater public, as it too was banned by the “sixth day” laws.

One of the biggest arguments against cloning, both in the film and in real life, is a religious one. The title of the film relates to a biblical verse from Genesis, shown in the opening credits, in which God created man in his own image on the sixth day. Tripp is a member of an extremist group that believes that clones of all kinds are abominations to God. That’s why he killed Hank and Drucker (and also Larry Stern, Drucker’s advance man. He must not have been worthy enough to get a syncording of himself, since he was never revived). Protesters in front of the Re-Pet store tell Adam that “God doesn’t want [him] to go in there,” to which he retorts, “then why did God kill my dog?” Adam has also heard the arguments and wonders if the cloned pets have no soul or are dangerous. He believes the same thing of his own clone, that is until it’s revealed that he is the clone instead.

Meanwhile, Drucker tries to make arguments for the benefits of cloning. He discusses a terminally ill son with a politician he hopes to get on his side. Drucker believes that cloning is a way to provide immortality (for himself), and give a fair chance at life to children born with terminal diseases. Ethically, there’s a lot more than those arguments, with other sci-fi stories describing cloned “organ banks” grown from an individual’s tissue, used to replace defective body parts. Here the replacement clones are discarded in a comical and haphazard manner (especially Wiley, who claims to remember his death from his previous body, even though his memories do not include that event). The 6th Day attempts to say that cloning is bad, if it’s done by the bad guys, but okay if it was done to you, as with Adam. With the current laws in place, Adam-2 would have been killed for just existing. Adam-Prime gets a quick change of heart in his beliefs and attitudes on cloning when it’s his own flesh and blood that’s on the line.

The Science in The Fiction

In real life, cloning is probably pretty boring. It looks no different from the normal growth and development of any other organism, except that it was conceived in a laboratory. A human clone would grow and develop like any other baby. Unfortunately for the film, that’s not exciting enough. Most films and television shows that dealt with duplicates of characters often create some technological marvel that makes the new character exactly the same as the original. Transporter accidents, machines that duplicate the current body and mind “as is,” or some other wonder allow the stories to happen without having to deal with a long wait. To show how quickly the process happens, at one point Talia is asked how many times she’s been cloned, to which she responds she has “lost track.” She then reveals the four dots under her eyelid that indicate she has been cloned four times, one of them being earlier that day. She either has false bravado or is very dumb.

The 6th Day also creates a “process” for the clones to be turned around in about two hours, much like ordering groceries online. Drucker explains that biological “blanks” are created that are humanoid, but lack the characteristics of the host. When the order to create a new clone comes in, the blank is imbued with the appropriate hormones and genetic material which allows it to grow to look just like the host. The memories, like a backup from a computer, are then restored into the blank, creating the duplicate. Drucker even takes pride in the fact that scars and other manifestations of having lived, are also reproduced. It’s a conceit that is necessary to keep the pace for an action film, while also giving the ability to have Schwarzenegger cloned. Because it would be less plausible to believe that someone had planned for this eventuality 50 years previous.

The Final Frontier

One thing about the film that seems humorous now, is the opening sequence at the XFL game. The XFL was a short lived sports league of less than a year. Maybe the filmmakers thought it was going places, (or maybe it was product placement), but the league didn’t last long after the release of the film. However, it was reborn, in a way, in 2020. Maybe not an exact clone, but a resuscitation of sorts. And naming the star quarterback Johnny Phoenix is just too on the nose, being that he does “rise from his ashes” as a clone. These are the sorts of precognitive fumbles that are made when injecting pop-culture and modern day references into futuristic films.

As mentioned earlier, the 21st Century has embraced the ideas of clones and cloning in a much greater way than the previous 50 years of entertainment. Television series like Kyle XY and Orphan Black look at more detailed consequences of cloning, while films like Moon, Attack of the Clones, and Avatar use it as plot elements, but not necessarily the focus of the film. There is even an intriguing sci-fi/horror film called Elizabeth Harvest that I watched last year that uses the science as a basis for domestic abuse. When done properly, films with cloning can be evocative and entertaining, while stimulating audiences’ brains about the moral and ethical dilemmas involved. The 6th Day does not qualify in that regard. It’s a fun enough action film, but in terms of the science and ethics, it’s not very intriguing. It only spoon feeds information to the audience rather than letting them make up their own minds about the technology, as they root for Arnold to come out on top.

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